Washington, May 2 (IANS) US President Barack Obama chose to keep Pakistan in the dark about the operation to attack and kill Osama bin Laden, the New York Times reported Monday.
‘We shared our intelligence on this compound (in Abbottabad) with no other country, including Pakistan,’ it quoted a senior administration official as saying.
The Times said that even after signing the formal orders authorising the raid, the president chose to keep Pakistan’s government in the dark about the operation.
‘It is no surprise that the administration chose not to tell Pakistani officials,’ the Times said. ‘Even though the Pakistanis had insisted that Bin Laden was not in their country, the US never really believed it.
‘American diplomatic cables in recent years show constant American pressure on Pakistan to help find and kill Bin Laden.’
There was intense speculation earlier Monday on whether or not the US had kept Islamabad in the know when it decided to storm bin Laden’s hideout in Abbotabad city, not far from Islamabad.
CNN cited an official as saying that for security reasons, the US did not share intelligence with any other country.
The official stressed that only a small group of people in the US knew about the operation when it was launched.
Soon after the killing, it became clear that Pakistan may not have been aware about the US raid to take out the elusive Al Qaeda leader.
Former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf said he was surprised Osama was in Abbottabad.
Musharraf, who was the Pakistan president during the 9/11 strike, told CNN-IBN that the operation by US forces was a ‘violation of our sovereignty’ — an implicit admission that Islamabad did not know about the American raid.
While Obama said in his speech that ‘it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding’, he underlined that this was an American operation.
Significantly, Obama said he called Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari after Osama was killed.
Similarly, the president said, ‘my team has also spoken with their Pakistani counterparts’ — another indication that the Pakistani intelligence was told about the kill only after the deed was done.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has had deep ties with both the Taliban, which sheltered Osama until 2001, and the Al Qaeda.
As years of hunt for Osama yielded nothing, many in the US suspected the ISI — or elements in the agency — were sheltering the man.
Pakistani officials kept insisting that Osama was not in Pakistan. That was until Monday.
